Disk write-caching

[LundFanatic]

I'd appreciate any help: I have XP home and the disk caching is turned
off. In device manager/properties/policies, it has the "optimized for
performance" checked, but is grayed out. It has nothing below it, such
as the box to check then enable/disable write caching on the disk box.
I have a 60 gig WD HD. I don't have the option to turn on the disk
caching. Any help is much appreciated!

[Jim]

Disk *hardware* caching is always ON (i.e, can't be disabled), so the option
to disable it is not provided (wouldn't serve any purpose). The only option
you *do* have is to disable *Windows* disk caching, which many benchmarking
tools use to prevent distortion of HD disk performance. FYI, in the end, it
doesn't matter all that much that you even *have* a HD cache -- the Windows
cache is MUCH bigger, more flexible, and traps so many requests in its own
cache, the HD cache rarely gets hit! The HD cache is more marketing gimmic
than anything else. It's only going to help in cases where the OS doesn't
provide its own cache, like MS-DOS.

HTH

Jim


"LundFanatic" > wrote in message
...
> I'd appreciate any help: I have XP home and the disk caching is turned
> off. In device manager/properties/policies, it has the "optimized for
> performance" checked, but is grayed out. It has nothing below it, such
> as the box to check then enable/disable write caching on the disk box.
> I have a 60 gig WD HD. I don't have the option to turn on the disk
> caching. Any help is much appreciated!